8 Tips To Create A Loveable WordPress Site

Anyone can create a WordPress site. But creating a WordPress site that website readers would love is another. As a matter of fact, it is the most challenging task ever.

In this post, we will discover the top 10 tips you need to take in order to create a WordPress website that generates readership.

If you took some time to find the best niche, you need to focus even more on thinking about your website layout.

A good WordPress layout allows your website visitors to have a better user experience. And when this happens, they will spend more time on your WordPress website.

Here are some of the criteria that make a good WordPress layout:

• ☑ Not cluttered
• ☑ Clean and minimalist
• ☑ Focused heavily on user experience (UX)

If you are a WordPress beginner, we recommend you to use Thrive Architect to build WordPress posts and pages. It is by far the easiest builder tool for WordPress. You can read our Thrive Architect review and if you want more options, head over to our top 5 WordPress drag and drop builders.

Wall of text is so 1990. If you are serious in starting a blog in 2020, focus embedding videos and images within your blog posts to improve the readership.

Human eyes are often more engaged (focused) on images and videos, instead of words. Take some time to think of the right image and video to be included in your blog post.

Here are some nifty tricks to help you leverage videos and images for better user experience (and reduce bounce rate):

• ☑ Place at least one video or image right after the first paragraph (opening/intro)
• ☑ Break down the long-form content with infographics or images
• ☑ Use royalty-free and high-resolution images to create a "wow" effect
• ☑ Using free image creation tools such as Canva is affordable and easy to use for WordPress beginners

Advertising banners are an awesome way to make money with a WordPress blog. However, if you are not creating a good WordPress site, you are not going to get much traffic (and this means lesser or no income at all from ads).

In this case, we recommend you to focus on using less than three banners per page and make them as relevant as possible. I also recommend you to have them on the sidebar, within the blog post and top of the content—places where it won't affect the overall user experience.

Serving ads is a great way to increase website revenue. It has to be done right, in order for you to make some decent money and at the same time, making your visitors happy. Here are some tips we recommend you to follow:

• ☑ Display only relevant ads on your website
• ☑ Reduce the number of ads display to maximize clicks and earnings
• ☑ Be upfront with website visitors about ads (displaying the word "Advertisement" or "Ads" are great ways to start)

We recommend you to have strong control over what you are promoting on your WordPress blog. We use OIO Publisher plugin to control the type of ads displayed, including the location of the display. This is a paid plugin, and there are several other free plugins that you can get from the WordPress repository too.

Does your website take more than 2 seconds to load? If the answer is "Yes", we might have a problem.

With today's technology advancement, a fast loading website is important. The definition of fast means loading speed of under 1.5 seconds.

By default, WordPress is a lightweight CMS and it doesn't require much speed configuration. However, when website owners install themes and other plugins, it will impact your website performance. All in all, leading to a slow loading website.

At WP Maven, we are website speed fanatic and we strive hard to make sure our website loads blazing fast. Take a look at the screenshot below.

How fast does our website loads? 797 milliseconds.

That's under a second and how can we achieve such? Here's the little trick.

Having a fast website is an important step in improving your overall Google ranking and making your website visitors happy. Here's how you can improve your website speed right now:

• ☑ Use a reliable WordPress hosting company (Bluehost for affordability and Kinsta for better overall performance)
• ☑ Use a cache plugin (we recommend Swift Performance or WP Rocket)
• ☑ Configure the cache plugin correctly
• ☑ Integrate with CloudFlare CDN service
• ☑ Ask your web hosting company if CloudFlare Railgun service is included in the package
• ☑ Minify and combine CSS, HTML and other static files
• ☑ Use bloat-free WordPress visual builder
• ☑ Remove unwanted CSS codes on your website

Is your website font too small? If you want to know, Google is the best for you. Add your website to Google Search Console and after 24 hours, you will receive some updates from Google. If your website font is too small (especially on mobile), Google will notify you and you need to do the needed changes to the font.

On average, we would say font size between 14 to 16 is sufficient for the mobile view (for comfortable viewing) but you are free to use the size that you are comfortable with.

The below is an infographic (source: BloggingX) which shares some additional about blog typography.

Here are some of the best tips when it comes to choosing font sizes for your WordPress website:

• ☑ Use a body font size around 16px
• ☑ Secondary text should be around 13px or 14px
• ☑ Avoid using Google Fonts unless you have a fast web hosting
• ☑ Use font sizes that look good on both mobile devices and desktop

Content is important and content is king (still). The only way to make your website visitors happy is to provide tons of value in the blog post.

The same goes for WP Maven. We have massive competitors (brands) such as WP Beginner, WP Tavern, Torque Magazine and many more. The only way we could compete with them is by providing quality content that is in demand. And even if the demand is short-term, that is still sufficient for us to build a brand name for ourselves.

Creating valuable content is not a gift—it is often supported by data (drive). Here's how you can create valuable content for your WordPress blog:

• ☑ Understand your competitor's content marketing strategy
• ☑ Define the approaches you want to take to beat your competitors
• ☑ Know what works for your competitors and try to replicate them
• ☑ Tools such as BuzzSumo helps a lot in content marketing and strategy

Another way to start a WordPress website that your readers will love is to do outdo your competitors. This means that whatever your competitors do, you need to do more and even better.

Hint: Grant Cardone's 10x Rule kinda contributed to this idea of ours.

We are in the WordPress space. And until date, there are not many blogs that publish daily WordPress tips and tutorials. We did our research and found out that this is a great way to penetrate the market.

Based on research, website visitors love downloadable items because they provide value. For WordPress website owners, it means that they can easily and constantly grow their email list—website visitors are required to share their email addresses before able to download.

When done correctly, downloadable content will be able to drive repeated readers and grow your website audience-ship.

Honestly speaking, creating great content is time-consuming. We take approximately 4 hours to create a blog post (and we have once a day publication). Here are some great tips you can follow:

• ☑ Use a content calendar
• ☑ Use content templates so that every content created has similar standards (we use both Evernote and Trello)
• ☑ We use Global Settings on visual builders (we recommend this one) to faster blog post creation

As a recap, there are many things you need to take into consideration especially when you want to create a successful WordPress blog. Always remember that these are the top 8 things that you need to take serious consideration before hitting the 'publish' button.

What do you think? Leave a comment below and let's discuss further.